Newsreal Looks at the World: this Week, Norway and the Nobel Peace Prize

When the Socialists on the Nobel Committee in Norway took a look at President Barack Obama’s accomplishments during his first twelve days in office and decided to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, they must have seen something that everyone else missed, as his accomplishments in those first twelve days (and since), could easily have been counted on one hand missing all of its fingers.

And yet, the President easily beat out 205 other names on the list of candidates nominated for that same honor. Here are some of the notable losers:

Ingrid Betancourt—

Marxist FARC guerrillas kidnapped Betancourt in 2002 while she was campaigning as an anti-corruption candidate for the Colombian presidency. She was held for more than six years in the most inhumane conditions before being rescued by the Columbian military.

Hu Jia—

Chinese dissident Hu Jia has worked tirelessly to expose the abuses of the Chinese Communist Government. He has been arrested numerous times, and has suffered immensely at the hands of the Communist Government. He is currently kept in isolation and his health is reported to be fragile.

Sima Samar—

Afghani doctor, human rights activist and chairwoman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Samar has spoken out against Sharia law. She has been threatened with death and ostracized by her government for daring to speak out for women’s rights in that Islamic country.

Dennis Mulwege–

A Congolese doctor who has made assisting victims of violent rape the entire focus of his practice in that war-torn country, Dr. Mulwege’s intervention and the establishment of his women’s clinic—the only one of its kind—has saved the lives of countless women who had no other options.

In the end, all of the above eminently deserving individuals (and more) were passed over for Barak Hussein Obama. It was a decision that not only stunned the world, but Obama himself. From his acceptance speech at Oslo:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility… And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage… Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight.

Actually, President Obama’s accomplishments are even less than slight. And yet, he was given the award. Why?

The short answer is that the Nobel Peace Prize no longer has anything to do with peace, and has everything to do with politics.

A look at a sampling of past Nobel Peace Prize laureates will further illustrate this point:

1984—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Tutu, who won the prize for his work against South Africa’s apartheid system, is closely allied to South Africa’s Communist Party. Today Tutu claims that U.S. injustices around the world provoked the attacks of 9/11; that America is an aggressive nation, which spends too much on defense and too little on aid to the poor; and that “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid.”

1992—Rigoberta Menchu

Menchu, a leftist icon and communist agent, falsely claimed authorship of a 1982 autobiography, which was later found to have been written by the French Marxist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.

1994—Yasser Arafat

In the “outrage heard around the world,” terrorist Yasser Arafat, whose unwavering goal was the destruction of Israel, shared the Award with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

2002—Jimmy Carter

A purely political decision, Carter’s honor, Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge later told reporters, “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current [U.S.] administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.”

Egyptian attorney who has served as Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 1997, ElBaradei’s strategy of appeasement proved unsuccessful at dissuading North Korea from developing a nuclear weapons program in the late 1990s and has been even less effective more recently vis-à-vis Iran.

Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to spread awareness about man-made global warming, a controversial concept whose very existence is denied by many eminent scientists and climatologists.

So much for the “peace” prize, which has become nothing more than an award given to socialists, miscreants, terrorists and liars.